The focus of this week's episode of the U.K.'s Secrets of South America was Argentina (last week's, featuring the clip of the beauty queen with mesh sewn to her tongue, was Venezuela). The show, a sort of modern imagining of the Prosperi/Jacopetti Mondo movies as hosted by a perky cross between Alexa Chung and Fiona Apple (Billie JD Porter), focused on the seeming contradiction between a society so liberal about sex (Argentina was, for example, the first Latin American country to legalize gay marriage) yet guided by the Catholic church.

In the clip above, 2013 Miss Venezuela First Runner-Up Wi May Nava describes the plastic surgery…
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Abortion is illegal in Argentina (though according to Porter, about half the country thinks it should be legalized). The most interesting part of the episode focused on this issue. A doctor discusssed the hazardous ways women will perform abortions on themselves, though getting professionals to do it doesn't seem much better: Many who perform abortions are not doctors and have no idea of the patient's medical history.

In the clip above, a woman named Camilla describes her illegal Argentinian abortion, and later there's undercover footage shot at a back-alley "clinic," where a cat roams free and a man gets extremely testy with the undercover reporter. He, too, is not a doctor.

All of this is but one reason why the idea of abortion being banned in places where it's legal (like, say, the United States) is so scary to so many.